Cloud providers publish draft universal API spec

Vendor lock-in has frequently been highlighted as one of the biggest concerns to enterprises adopting both public and private clouds, and is cited as a major barrier for mass adoption.

Thankfully some of the industry’s largest players have taken notice and last night revealed a draft version of an API specification allowing intercompatibility between clouds, both public and private.

Known as Cloud Application Management for Platforms (CAMP), the draft has been written by seven big-name vendors: Oracle, Rackspace, Red Hat, CloudBees, Cloudsoft Corporation, Huawei and Software AG.

CAMP has been proposed as a language-agnostic API to provide a common interface for cloud management. The draft has yet to be approved by OASIS, the not-for-profit standards body, but you can have a read of it on the 57-page specification document [PDF].

In theory, the API should allow management of multiple clouds through a single common interface, making it easier to move applications between clouds and from an on-premise server out into the wilderness. It also allows for infrastructure management to be abstracted by cloud providers wanting to provide a simpler user experience.

There a plenty of notable absentees from the initial list, including Amazon, Google, Windows Azure, Salesforce and Heroku, who have everything to lose from increasing interoperability between clouds. Of course, if CAMP takes off and becomes the norm throughout the rest of the industry, there may be increasing pressure to jump on the bandwagon.

For more information, check out Oracle’s blog post or the new cloudspecs.org.

Photo by kewl.